The N word

From Mark Twain to Chris Rock, it provokes book banning and nervous giggles. A black scholar asks if it's ever OK to say "nigger."

By Charles Taylor

Jan 22, 2002 | "I am addressing the contention that the presence of nigger alone is sufficient to taint ... any ... text. I am addressing those who contend that nigger has no proper place in American culture and those who desire to erase the N-word totally, without qualification, from the cultural landscape. I am addressing parents who, in numerous locales, have demanded the removal of 'Huckleberry Finn' from syllabi solely on the basis of the presence of the N-word -- without having read the novel themselves, without having investigated the way in which it is being explored in class, and without considering the possibilities opened by the close study of a text that confronts so dramatically the ugliness of slavery and racism. I am addressing the eradicationists who, on grounds of racial indecency, would presumably want to bowdlerize or censor poems such as Carl Sandburg's 'Nigger Lover,' stories such as Theodore Dreiser's 'Nigger Jeff,' Claude McKay's 'Nigger Lover,' or Henry Dumas's 'Double Nigger,' plays such as Ed Bullins' 'The Electronic Nigger,' and novels such as Gil-Scott Heron's 'The Nigger Factory.'"

And why stop there? To the list that Randall Kennedy provides in his new book "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," you could add Joseph Conrad's "The 'Nigger' of the Narcissus," Dick Gregory's autobiography "Nigger" (with its touching dedication to his dead mother, "If you ever hear the word 'nigger' again, remember, they're advertising my book"), the stand-up comedy of Richard Pryor or any historically accurate discussion of racism or the civil rights movement.

I ran into an example of the eradicationism that Randall Kennedy talks about recently when I reviewed "Reaching for Glory," the second volume of conversations LBJ taped in the White House, for the Sunday book section of a New York daily. I had quoted a speech the president made at a 1964 New Orleans fund-raiser, an excoriating attack on the segregationist Southern Democrats who unfailingly appealed to racism in every election.

LBJ told the story of a Democratic senator who said to him that his "poor state" hadn't heard a truly Democratic speech in 30 years. "All they ever hear at election time," the president said, "is nigger, nigger, nigger!" The speech was reported in every major newspaper the next day. Mary McGrory, the leading liberal columnist of the day, said it was the most moving speech LBJ had ever made. Thirty-seven years later, I was unable to quote it in a major newspaper. It wasn't my editor's call but that of a higher-up who has decreed that the word will never appear in that paper -- even, it seems, when quoting a presidential speech.

It didn't matter that the ugliness of "nigger" was precisely LBJ's point. Such blanket refusals to print "nigger" simply eradicate context and intent. You can't argue with that kind of nonthought. When it comes to this sort of cleaning up of history, the result is, of course, to erase history itself, and thus our ability to learn anything from it. But there's a problem. How do you defend "nigger"?

To say that a white person couldn't have written this book is not to insult the fine, perspicacious job Randall Kennedy, a member of the Harvard Law School faculty, has done here, or to suggest that he might be replaceable. Whites mostly use "nigger" as either a racist epithet or when describing racist attitudes. We can't use it in all the ways that black people can, as the sort of insult people make against their own (in "Ali," Giancarlo Esposito, playing Cassius Clay, Sr., refers to the Nation of Islam as a bunch of "bowtie-wearin', Arab-talkin' niggers"), as an expression of affection, as a joshing taunt, as a subversive appropriation of a word that still retains its power to wound. (Kennedy recalls Tupac Shakur's telling him that "nigga" stood for "Never Ignorant, Gets Goals Accomplished.")

Kennedy quotes Helen Jackson Lee's autobiography "Nigger in the Window," in which Lee writes of her Cousin Bea, who "had a hundred different ways of saying nigger ... it could be opened like an umbrella to cover a dozen different moods, or stretched like a rubber band to wrap up our family with other colored families ... Nigger was a piece-of-clay word that you could shape ... to express your feelings."

Kennedy doesn't entertain the romantic notion that the word can be completely defanged, that to make it commonplace would be to deprive it of its power. (For one thing, except when quoting, he refuses to soften the word into "nigga.") Kennedy includes the still-vivid memories of such people as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, August Wilson and Branford Marsalis of how the word was used to wound them. He writes of the way "nigger" has been used to powerful effect in African-American literature in the autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, and in Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."

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